As I mentioned in the previous post, they were not meant to guide the topic selection process for the coming year, those were and will continue to be rather emergent, but as a way to create a snapshot-in-time of questions that were top of mind that can then serve as a point of reference for reflection on how they evolve throughout the year.

And in fact, only 20% of last year’s posts can be directly mapped to one of the questions. However, most of the remaining 80% definitely helped evolve my thinking on these issues in a more indirect way. Below are the interim answers and future areas of investigation around these questions:

1. What does the future of the firm really looks like?

The posts more directly covering this topic were Rhizomatic Organizations [Rao] and A Working Class Manifesto [Kilpi] but they were rather abstract and perhaps created more questions than they answered. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but still… Many of the other posts that in retrospect fell under the “Organizational Theory” theme also address this question indirectly. This is the most abstract question on this list so I wasn’t expecting a full answer to emerge in a year. However a strong connection emerged between this question and Question #3. More on that below.

In a knowledge economy where most roles require heavy collaboration and creatively solving high-cognitive-load challenges, standard target/goal-based pay-for-performance schemes cause more harm than good. This doesn’t mean that any form of variable pay is automatically off the table, but it can only be tied to more qualitative long-term behaviors that are difficult to objectively and fairly assess.

We need to be deliberate and consistent in choosing our position in the compensation polarity and be able to clearly articulate it to candidates (and existing employees).

We need to move towards a more competency-based recruiting process from the first touch-point with the candidate. But this has to go hand-in-hand with a more thoughtful selling process that allows that candidate to better qualify the opportunity. There’s an interlocking pattern in the increased commitment of both parties involved that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet.

There’s a strong inertia/standard in the candidate/company dynamic, which means that there’s a cost to “breaking the mold” since it introduces increased cognitive load into the interaction. Explaining “why we do things different here” from the get-go is critical but insufficient, since this is not a purely rational process

I expect more insights on this front in 2018 since I’ll be more heavily involved in recruiting in 2018 than I was in 2017.

3. How do we effectively manage deep diversity?

The only post that directly ties to this topic is Just Like Me [Delizonna]. However, the mind-share I’ve spent on this topic this year is grossly under-represented in the number of posts on this topic.

This topic has been getting a lot of media attention this past year, but it was disheartening to see how little of it was actually evidence-based. In this short period of time “best practices” emerged despite being proven ineffective or even harmful. We desperately need a more disciplined approach to tackling this critical topic.

Some interim insights:

Increasing organizational diversity is the wrong starting point in this effort. Increased diversity without a real capacity for inclusion (for example, real psychological safety) will be ineffective at best and hugely harmful at worse.

A better starting point is increasing the “inclusive capacity” of the organization — the ability to foster a sense of belonging for a growing cohort of people without having to compromise their personal identities in any way.

This is particularly critical given question #1. We can’t create “communities of meaning around economic collaboration” without a strong sense of belonging.

4. What will we find if we start peeling the “employee engagement” onion?

Charles Goodhart’s quote “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” best describes the current situation with employee engagement. Consider this: what would you do when you hit “100% employee engagement” (whichever way you measure it)?

Viewed through the lens of a continuous-improvement exercise, the absolute level of “employee engagement” becomes less meaningful compared to insights on how we can improve it. More on this next week.

A better way to think about “employee engagement” is as a community reflection exercise aimed at identifying where we should focus next to best improve the way we’re working together.

This goal has some significant implications to the way we should design any employee engagement programs/exercise, starting first and foremost with eliminating the dichotomous allocation of agency around improving employee engagement between “employees” and “leadership” that’s so heavily ingrained into the current survey-based structures.

A real investment in personal development (question #5) is required in order to fully see the benefits of an alternative model.

5. How can we up-level development programs?

This past year reaffirmed my belief that development programs that are competency-based will be ineffective in driving the change we seek. Instead they must be focused on creating and sustaining mindset shifts. I continue to noodle on this one with no clear answers yet, but a more pointed/focused question: “How can we design an environment and interventions that foster continuous mindset shifts?”. Given the critical role that personal development plays in the answers to questions #3, #4, and #7 — figuring this out will be critical for any meaningful forward progress.

I haven’t written anything about this in 2017 but will cover it in a post next week. While I can’t prove that such principle exists, I’m growing more and more convinced that designing people programs assuming that it does will likely increase their effectiveness. Both knowing we stand and how we can get better are important. The more we can decouple efforts aimed at evaluating performance from efforts aimed at driving development — the better.

7. What are the various paths from Patriarchy to Partnership?

I tackled this topic directly in Bounded Specialization (and the limits of human collaboration) offering a piece of a path that’s focused on deliberately constraining authority dynamics across both context and time dimensions. It’s still a partial answer, but a better reframing of the challenge compared to “eliminate hierarchy” or “self-management” labels, in my opinion.

Part of the incompleteness of the answer comes from the fact that it’s looking only at the external environment. If the way we make meaning out of the world around us (our mindsets) can lead two people to act very differently under the same external circumstances, as I believe it does, that’s another part of the answer that needs to be more fully flushed out.

An updated mental snap-shot

If we view organizations as a way for enabling large-scale collaboration efforts beyond the scale we’re currently evolutionarily capable of naturally carrying out successfully, then the key questions that can illuminate our path forward are:

What are the principles that are underlying and driving these collaboration efforts? (directionally — where do we want to go?)

What is the professional growth required in order to more easily/naturally adhere to these principles? And how can we foster it?

What are the environmental structures that can be put in place as scaffolding for future growth and as a way to minimize the risk of any reactive behavior/growth gaps from holding us back?

I can’t believe I’m wrapping up my 3rd full year of weekly posts (OrgHacking got started in May 2014) making this my 3rd annual “year in review” post!

OrgHacking has always been first and foremost a personal self-reflection tool. A way to bring some order and structure to my highly-associative way of thinking, cementing some foundations in place and making it easier to develop new ideas and ways of thinking on top of them. This year in particular, the fruits of that labor are starting to be more clearly visible, as evident by the number of self-referencing posts — building on top of old OrgHacking posts, expanding and evolving the ideas discussed in them.

While the process of picking which topics to cover has always been and continues to be rather emergent — based on experiences I had and content I’ve read close to the time of drafting — this year, I’ve also posted a small set of questions at the beginning of the year. These were meant to be more of snapshot-in-time of questions that were top of mind to me back then, with the intent of observing how they evolve throughout the year.

This year, I’ve decided to break my annual reflection into two separate posts: Part 1 (this post) will be the regular thematic summary of the 2017 OrgHacking posts. Part 2 will look at the content through the lens of the 7 questions and pose some new ones for the upcoming year.

It’s always an interesting exercise to get all of this year’s posts on a single Google Doc. This year it was a good reminder of how subjective my perception of time really is. Some posts felt like they’ve been written yesterday, and some posts I almost completely forgot that I wrote. While there’s some overlap between the themes and the categorization of posts is not mutually exclusive, the key themes this year were: Strategy & Operations, Book Reviews, Organizational Theory, Personal Growth, and Healthy Organizational Practices.

A couple of final observations on this year’s posts and writing experience:

I was positively surprised by the amount of original/deep synthesis posts I wrote this year. About a third of the posts went beyond the standard pattern of “summary and expansion” to offer a more thorough analysis or a multi-source synthesis. This is either a result of my thinking evolving and “developing my own voice” or a byproduct of my “posts backlog” becoming completely unwieldy (+100 rough ideas/links) to the point of uselessness, “forcing” me to create more original content. Either way, I’m happy with the outcome.

This is the 2nd year of OrgHacking being a Medium-first publication with cross-posting on orghacking.com. The clean writing interface is certainly the killer feature, but it doesn’t make the inability to easily access ALL historical content or the limited search functionality less annoying 🙂 Since starting to use Grammarly (yay, dogfooding!) the lack of Grammarly support made me reconsider switching back to WordPress several times.

In April of this year, I participated in my first Vipassana meditation 10-day retreat. While I wouldn’t call the experience transformational, it definitely left a profound positive impact on me. Not only was it my first multi-day meditation experience, it was also the first time I got any sort of meaningful exposure to secular Buddhist philosophy.

Each day ended with a 90 minute “Dhamma Talk” which quickly became my favorite part of the day, both because it signaled the end of the day, but also because it allowed me to engage with the whole experience in the way that I felt most comfortable with — using my head.

I came to the retreat with ideas from Attachment Theory (AT) still very fresh in my head, and I was curious to see whether I’d be able to reconcile the apparent tension around the word attachment. In AT it has neutral to positive connotation, while in Buddhism it typically has a negative one. Another tension that I was working through was my initial interpretation of the Buddhist case against craving and aversion as a case for inaction, which did not sit well with my personal philosophy and experience.

The diagram at the top of this post summarizes how I went about reconciling these two tensions (and a few others) and how I ended up with the conclusion that these two points of view (AT and Buddhism) have more in common than meets the eye. It and the discussion below it not mean to meet any scientific bar of rigor. I just think it’s an interesting thought experiment to overlay some of the things that these two points of view have in common, as imprecise as it may be.

To start we need to distinguish between two important words: reaction — which I’ll use to describe impulsive behavior or action; and response — which I’ll use to describe deliberate behavior or action, following some cognitive processing and a conscious decision to act in a certain way.

I found it useful to anchor both points of view in a shared spectrum based on our Acute Stress Response, more commonly known as the Fight-or-Flight response. While this term refers to the two extreme, reactive modes of engagement with a stimulus: flight (approach) and flight (retreat), literature also often mentions the middle reactive mode — freeze. This gives us a reactive spectrum of: flight — freeze — fight.

In essence, both points of view make a case for moving from reactions to responses, or from reactive states to responsive states. They just use different labels to describe them. While Buddhism describes a flight reaction as “aversion” AT calls it “fearful avoidant” behavior. While Buddhism describes a fight reaction as “craving”, AT calls it “anxious preoccupied” behavior. The concept of freezing, reactive inaction did not come up in the parts of Buddhist philosophy that I got exposed to, but I think it maps well to AT’s “dismissive avoidant” behavior.

I’m not sure that slotting the “response” sections in between the reactive ones makes the most sense, but responses do tend to be more moderate than reactions. One thing that this doesn’t capture well is the notion of choosing not act (deliberate inaction), which is different than freezing.

In any case, this post ended up being more abstract than usual, but I hope that some of you may still find it useful.

Don’t let the WordArt-inspired cover design fool you! Even though it’s not offering a full solution to the top-of-funnel problem, it’s taking a worthy crack at it and several other key challenges in the process, which makes it one of the best recruiting books out there.

I came across the book since Grammarly is using it, and another all-time favorite of mine, Who: The A Method for Hiring, as the basis for our hiring manager and interviewer training. The two books have a lot in common at the principles level, but offer different tactics to support them. H&GH stands out b/c it paints a more holistic and detailed picture of the entire process, compared to Who.

The Good

There are several distinctions and frameworks that I found to be particularly useful in H&GH:

Before Day 1 / Day 1 / Year 1 / Beyond Year 1 decision-making criteria: There’s a big disconnect between what seems to matter for both candidates and companies before accepting a job, and what truly impacts their performance after accepting the job. The more you can orient your selling and evaluation process towards the Year 1 and beyond criteria — the better.

The Performance Profile: is H&GH’s version of Who’s “Scorecard” describing the job in terms of outcomes rather than a set of skills and responsibilities. This is then used for both designing an evaluation process that’s outcome-focused and crafting a job description that’s selling “year 1 and beyond” criteria.

Segmenting the talent market: Super passives, explorers, tiptoers, searchers, networkers, hunters & posters — are all in different stages of engagement and progress in their career change process and need to be approached and interacted with differently.

On-site: PSQ, MSA and SMARTe: Asking a performance profile-based problem-solving question (PSQ), following up with a most-significant-accomplishment question (MSA) tackling a similar challenge in a past job, and utilizing fact-finding around the specific task, measurement, actions, results, time-frame and the environment (SMARTe) to get a full picture.

Closing: utilizing the candidate career decision matrix: a great tool to bring “year 1 and beyond” criteria into the decision-making process.

The Could-be-better

There were a handful of ideas and concepts that didn’t sit well with me and could potentially be improved.

The Hiring Formula: is on the one hand complex and on the other hand not too actionable. I wonder if a “formula” is the right analogy here and if there are better evaluation buckets that are worth considering.

Gap around “How?”: this may be tied to the Hiring Formula. There’s a lot of good advice in the book on how to evaluate candidates for a pattern of achievement throughout their careers and how to assess whether they’ll be able to accomplish the “What?” (results) of the role. The slightly more intangible conversation on the “How?” (“will they be able to do it in ways that are aligned with our company values and culture?”) received very few pages in the book, though this aspect of a candidate’s fit is hugely important.

Reducing On-site bias: there’s actually quite a bit of discussion in the book around ways to reduce bias in the recruiting process. The appendix discussing the legal compliance implications of using performance-profile-based job descriptions is fantastic. But there seems to be a big gap around discussing bias as it pertains to the Problem Solving Question, on two separate dimensions: the first is around designing a PSQ experience that is as much “in-real-life context” as possible, taking into account the fact that the ability to solve a particular problem “out-of-context” and “in-context” varies greatly. The second is around developing explicit criteria for consistently assessing the quality of different answers, given that there’s no single right answer.

In Sum

While not error/gaps-free (which is an entirely unrealistic expectation), Hiring and Getting Hired is one of the best recruiting books that I’ve read to date, and I’d highly recommend it for recruiters, hiring managers, candidates and everyone else who’s curious.

Burnout is a hot button organizational topic, even outside the realm of the fast-paced tech startups of Silicon Valley. However, there are also a lot of misconceptions about it, what causes it and what to do about it. So this is my attempt to summarize the more useful and credible information I was able to find about this important topic.

Let’s start with a more accurate definition: burnout is a syndrome that results from applying ineffective coping strategies to dealing with stress. It’s most common mental and physical symptoms are exhaustion, cynicism and professional inefficacy. A recent study elaborates further:

Exhaustion is the feeling of not being able to offer any more of oneself at an emotional level

Cynicism represents a distant attitude towards work, those served by it, and colleagues

Inefficacy is the feeling of not performing tasks adequately or being incompetent at work.

To understand burnout, we need to start by understanding stress.

Stress is our physiological response to an environmental condition that we unconsciously perceive as a threat, often also referred to as the “Fight of Flight” response. Our sympathetic nervous system and our adrenal glands (by secreting cortisol hormone into the bloodstream) prepare out body to take action to respond to the threat:

While stress was evolutionarily designed as a survival mechanism, moderate levels of stress, often referred to as eustress, have a positive impact on performance:

Problems arise when the level of stress exceeds our physical and mental ability to deal with it. Experiencing this unsustainable level of distress for long periods of time eventually leads to burnout.

While burnout can be more clinically diagnosed using the Maslach Burnout Inventory Test, there are many leading indicators on the path for burnout. Herbert Freudenberger the psychologist who first identified burnout as a unique syndrome and gave it its name, identified a 12-stage process which, without effective intervention, eventually leads to full burnout syndrome:

Source: Scientific American

Once burnout reaches a clinical stage treatment requires clinical intervention. But often times burnout can be avoided by more gentle interventions prior to that. The interventions that can be applied once symptoms start manifesting themselves can easily be considered also as effective preventative strategies if turned into healthy habits:

Make self-care your #1 priority, before work: eating well, getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, taking time off in meaningful chunks (several days) and investing in your closest social relationships. Consider adopting more of a segmentor approach to managing your work and non-work time.

Strengthen and reflect on your motivation for doing the work — do an Immunity To Change exercise and uncover the hidden commitments that lead you to overwork. Design safe experiments to start loosening the hold that these commitments have on your life. Motivation is driven by both meaning (the work that we do here matters to me) and impact (the work that I do here, matters to others) and there can be disconnects on both fronts. Build deliberate reflective spaces into your routine to identify what they are and work to resolve them.

Invest in developing mindfulness and self-awareness — in the context of managing stress and burnout the benefits are two-fold: i) tactically, in situations that trigger the “fight or flight” response, identify the sensory triggers that tell you that you are in that state and take deliberate action to diffuse them, and avoid staying in that mode more than you absolutely have to. You’re essentially increasing your capacity to deal with stress effectively ii) More strategically, identify the symptoms that suggest that you’re on track for burnout sooner rather than later and take corrective action.

Today I’m going to try an touch on a loaded topic without fully tripping the landmine: employee engagement.

So let’s start with a big disclaimer: “Employee engagement” is a peculiar label. It’s defined by different people in different ways. There’s no good direct way to measure it, and the indirect ways are far from perfect. While there are reams of research that have shown a correlation between improved employee engagement and business outcomes, I’ve yet to have seen a highly-rigorous, randomized, controlled test that demonstrates causality. And finally, even if we accept the fact that this is something that we want to improve, opinions differ on who owns that problem and what are the best ways to do so.

No that we got that out of the way, it’s worth calling out what we can learn from the conversation around engagement: under the engagement banner, large groups of smart people set out to study organizations and figure out how to best create an environment in which the individuals in the org are set up to be highly productive and highly committed to the org. And while we need to be very careful about not over-interpreting any sort of measurement, the process of measurement and the conversation around the results gives us a shared language to talk about what we want to improve and structure and cadence to take action that will start moving us in that direction.

I’ve been following the engagement conversation quite closely over the last 4–5 years or so, and was curious to see how do the different “thought leaders” in this space differ in the way they decompose engagement to its enabling components (whether they use the “engagement” label or not).

So I decided to do my own little micro-meta-analysis comparing them. I’ve looked at four key players:

Gallup Q12 — Gallup is credited with making “engagement” a thing. Their 12-questions questionnaire it a the core of their research and has been considered to be for many years the “gold standard” for measuring engagement. Gallup’s 12 questions can be divided into 4 categories: basic needs, management support, teamwork, and growth. I’ve decided to use that categorization as a shared taxonomy in comparing the various engagement frameworks.

Google — Google’s People Operations team has done some really phenomenal work in the last 5 years or so, applying really rigorous research to exploring organizational performance questions. They have also been kind enough to open-source much of their research on the Re:Work blog. Without labeling as “engagement research” Google has set out on two massive multi-year projects. The first, Project Oxygen, explored “what makes managers effective?”. The second, Project Aristotle, explored “what makes teams effective?”.

CultureAmp — CultureAmp is one of the leading vendors of what can be colloquially referred to as “engagement software”. As opposed to other vendors in their space, they dig very deeply into the science behind the business problems that their products are aiming to solve. They employ in-house organizational psychologists that help support the product development process. In designing their employee engagement survey product, CultureAmp developed the LEAD framework, which decomposes engagement enablers into 4 key categories: Leadership, Enablement, Alignment, and Development.

The Mind Gym— The Mind Gym is an L&D consultancy, portions of its work were covered here a few weeks back. I’m fairly impressed with the level of scientific rigor they bring into their solutions so I was curious to see how they’re approaching the topic of engagement. Their approach decomposes engagement based on the roles that the individual, manager, leadership, and colleagues play in creating the necessary conditions for strong engagement.

The results are summarized in the table and screenshot below:

Eyeballing the overlap between Gallup, Google, and CultureAmp, I’d say that there’s about 70% overlap between the three frameworks if we ignore some minor framing or focus difference in the way some of the questions/statements were worded. Both Google and CultureAmp got rid of the weirdest Gallup question (“I have a best friend at work”). Google adds more focus on team dynamics. CultureAmp adds more focus on systemic/organizational issues that span more than the immediate team. While I had some preconception that there’s quite a bit of overlap between the Gallup questions and what Google’s Project Oxygen uncovered, seeing how Project Aristotle “filled in the blanks” in many ways was an interesting discovery. And while I like the CultureAmp LEAD categorization a bit more than Gallup’s, the underlying content is not that much different.

The MindGym turned out to be the odd duck of the four. Mostly in a good way. In full transparency, The Mind Gym does have its own 24-question assessment questionnaire that would make their approach look a little more similar to the other three, but only a handful of questions map well. The Mind Gym does seem to take a fundamentally different approach thinking about engagement, viewing it much more as a mindset shift, driven by the individual and supported through all the other players in the organization. My one qualm with their framework is that the scientific approach supporting different pieces of it seems a bit anecdotal/stitched together, but in fairness, it’s an unfair bar to evaluate them against considering the opacity of the academic research behind the other three. It is still the approach that resonates with me the most and the one I’m most curious to better understand and explore further.

Retention is a delicate professional topic. Parting ways is a painful experience, regardless of the circumstances. However, it is especially emotionally loaded when it happens unilaterally and takes the other side by surprise. We, therefore, tend to view these situations as inherently “bad.” Where in fact, in some cases, parting ways while still regrettable was the right thing to do, and in some cases, it could and should have been avoided.

Nico Canner, CEO of Incandescent, offers a simple checklist to separate situations in which parting ways was the right thing to do, from situations in which it should and could have been avoided:

1. Did we have an open dialogue with that individual about their dreams, priorities and concerns, the different kinds of opportunities they were thinking about on the outside, and what might be possible for them within the firm?

2. Did we think creatively and well about the best way for that individual to realize their aspirations within the firm, and identify specific things that would make a positive difference?

3. If we made any commitments based on this dialogue, did we fulfill them?

If we answered “yes” to all three questions, we have done the right things, and parting ways was the right outcome. If we answered “no” to any of the three questions, we could have done more to keep a talented employee.

#3 is relatively straightforward — honor your commitments / don’t make promises you cannot keep. However, consistently answering “yes” to #1 and #2 usually requires putting in place a bit of structure/process to help us ensure that these conversations are taking place consistently and effectively.

How to have these conversations is where some of Google’s contributions to their Re:Work People Ops open-source repository come in particularly handy:

GROW is a neat problem-solving/coaching framework that’s been around for a few decades. Variants have evolved over the years but in one of the more popular variations GROW stands for Goal, Reality, Obstacles/Options, Way forward. Google developed a very good career development conversation worksheet around this framework, focusing on four key reflection questions:

Goal: What do you want?

Reality: What’s happening now?

Options: What could you do?

Way forward: What will you do?

One of the things I particularly like about it, is that it avoids a common anti-pattern in these interactions that implicitly (over even worse, explicitly) shifts the responsibility for the employee’s career development from the employee to the manager. You are always the primary person responsible for your career development. However, the manager can be a powerful ally in coaching you through the process and helping you to remove obstacles. The shared inquiry framing of the worksheet allows the manager to play the role of a proactive coach in the process, without assuming an unreasonable amount of responsibility in the process.